That’s the breaking news this morning as NewsRadio told me was going to be widely reported in Fairfax and Newscorp papers, ahead of an announcement from Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. Here’s Bianca Hall from The Age: The Coalition will […]

The Rethinking thread ended up very much as a roundtable. It’s approaching 300 comments, so a new one is in order. To me the last few days have been dominated by two issues. One is the treatment of asylum seekers, […]

Kevin Rudd’s changes to the Labor leadership election process (of which more later from me) will be considered, and almost certainly adopted by Caucus today. Today is the last date on which an election can be called for August 24. […]

In my earlier post I expected, like many, that Rudd would emphasise the international initiatives he would take to stem the flow of asylum seekers by boat. Instead the centre piece was the PNG solution (see transcript of the joint […]

I used to joke that every time I went interstate, weird stuff started happening in politics. Now, I think I can confidently declare that it gets even weirder when I go overseas. I flew back into Brisbane from Heathrow on […]

Rather than post these links at the end of an already long election roundtable thread, here they are in a separate post, most from Radio National. First from The World Today Abbott: Rudd on ‘international crusade’ over refugee convention It […]

Australia has rushed through legislation to offer citizenship rights to refugees. If they can bowl decent leg breaks. Thousands of others are instead detained in malaria-infested Manus Island or Nauru, or stuck in legal limbo unable to work and paid […]

Things get rather willing in Parliament at times. In the last days of parliamentary sessions the Government is trying pass the amendments relating to 457 visa workers. The LNP at first seemed OK with the amendments seeing them as some […]

Demographer Professor Peter McDonald put the basic equation very clearly on the 7.30 program back on 14 March. Each year the Australian labour force grows by 1%, that’s about 120,000. In addition we have about 140,000 more baby boomers retiring […]